A List of Thoughts to Cure Resentment
Questions, invitations, and statements to build a better life.
Here is a list of thoughts I had when dealing with personal issues. I have attached a few sources from literature, film and history to a few main points I think have been most emotional to this process. Some points in the list are questions rather than statements and rules. The reason they are posed as questions rather than demands is because they are an invitation to thought and a way to answer them. I hope this list, which has helped me in my own development, will also help those who wish to get the same wisdom.
Human beings are complicated creatures, which means there is a low probability of understanding people.
Healthy means ideal, the norm, socially constructed and moral.
We tell each other what we want.
Maybe I am imposing my judgements on people too quickly. Maybe I am not willing to reward those who need it most.
Practise remembering.
Your personality matches the demands of the environment.
It’s not obvious that personality is inside you.
When change strikes, there is a problem with your psychological adjustment and outlook on the world.
Multi-generational familial problems are a result of being dependent on The Family.
There are dirty little secrets, skeletons in the closet, and failures of courage.
Learn when you’re wrong.
There will be times when there is something wrong with your model.
You have to go into the underworld (so to speak), grab what was left behind, and take back what you lost as a child.
Break down your biggest fears into stages.
Use conceptual tools to build yourself.
How would the world look if it was made of actions, or values, rather than just objects?
Life is a plot.
Honest communication leads to a personality transformation.
Abstract the meta of the story.
We are very strange: we don’t care about the story or the tradition: we do things we can’t account for.
You don’t know you don’t know.
There are suspicious things: things you have to see through.
Dreams and goals are the birthplace of thought.
Who could you be?? And what could that look like?
You act out entities of things you don’t understand.
Stand up to those who corrupt the game: stop playing along with it (when interacting with people who aren’t treating you properly).
Examine your presumptions and your fears of terrible experiences.
Go back to the terrible events, untie them, straighten them out, and drop them.
How can you reclaim those parts of yourself?
Understand and admit the things about you which are darkest and malevolent and evil (The Shadow).
Inside the shadow lies The Mother.
You learn things the hard way.
You are still 6 years old.
Stop speaking high-pitched, speak in a deep voice.
You have to die…and wait for the rebirth.
Human beings can’t be categorised easily (e.g. protons, triangles, vodka).
People live in an illusion of what they see and what they value.
“Life is a play…there are entrances and exists, men and women are the players, and one man in his time plays many parts”.
You don’t know you’re capable of sheer rage.
You need to route yourself to a culture when you interact with people.
The base rate of rejection is 98%
Make a routine.
Figure out how to tell the truth and what you want.
Take a page from the Bowerbird: Brush off your nest and make another one.
Climb a single, particular dominance hierarchy.
Your environment isn’t Nature, it is Culture and People.
The chances that you exist are so small because a lot had to die for you to be here: therefore your ancestors succeeded; there is something, some character which did it.
Integrate the shadow: understand just how violent, creepy, dark, predatory, and horrible you can be.
Transformation exists when you discover the demons and the shadow.
If you run away from things, they will chase you and you will be prey to them .
You cannot stand up to your mother, you are afraid of your mother.
You should be bored by what you’re afraid of.
Teach yourself you’re stronger than you think.
You’re not as much of a scaredy-cat as you think, you can grow teeth and you can fight.
Women are attractive but rejecting, rejecting, rejecting…men are petrified into immobility.
Can you speed up your own development?
Initial representation is low resolution.
You cry because you encounter trauma, chaos and the unknown.
Writing about how you overcame emotional events will help.
The facts have to be relevant.
What is constant across transformations?
We’re imitating each other.
You have to die so that you’re not static. You should transform at the right and balanced rate.
Dreams compress memories to the ‘gist’ because you cannot remember everything.
Find what you once lost as a child and regain it.
The society crushes and disciplines you to be productive.
The soul, the feminine teaches “it’s not all that it could be.”
You confuse privilege for competence.
How much are you going to explore? What if you explore so much that it hurts you?
You find ideas that contradict your own.
Because you are open, your niche is relationships, not competitive or productive. You are more concerned with transformation.
Use the past to prepare you for the future. Don’t let it be a load on you.
You’re always going to write bad first drafts, but they will get better the more you write.
If you want to stop being alone, you have to make new friends. You have to rebuild your life, rebuild everything you do.
Don’t appeal to ideologies that don’t offer a responsibility.
Honesty and trust are the best natural resources.
There is something deep that can be grabbed and carried up.
Sometimes, it isn’t your fault but a consequence of society’s evil.
You sacrifice yourself so people put you down and condescend you at parties.
Change your face: “I can take anything that’s coming my way” instead of ”friendly, nice, naive punching bag.”
Resentment means you should grow up, or because people have been taking advantage of you.
You have to grow some teeth. You have to become a judge.
You act things you don’t understand.
Defence mechanisms include; denial, neglect, displacement, rationalism, sublimation, repression, reaction formation, identification, intellualisation, and projection.
The people who were responsible for your development and your growth facilitated your weakness, resentment and internal aggression.
There will be people who will treat you unfairly: and you better tell them!
Different systems of axioms have different tools
The scientific world is stripped of subjectivity. However, without the subject, we are led into nihilism.
Make reality everything you experience, rather than what is.
Pain and Beauty are fundamentals of Being, Pain is perhaps the most fundamental.
You don’t want to know what’s inside you, you want to know what’s outside of you (e.g. friends, job, family etc...)
You make half-steps because you think by taking full steps you’ll step in shit.
Do you have a job?
Do you have an intimate relationship?
Do you have a family?
Integrate your emotions with your thoughts.
Build a strategy, build options.
Anger will put a strain on your heart.
Erase the distinction between the Self and the World.
Admit “something is wrong with me and I’m willing to talk about it truthfully.”
Actions speak louder than words.
Suffering is intrinsic to life, it is normal.
If you hadn’t had childhood trauma, you might be healthy—but it also might be unavoidable.
Everyone has a justification for suicide.
How do you conduct yourself in misery?
You were thrown into experience, you have to deal with it? How?
Shaking in the face of the unknown or eager to explore the unknown.
Voluntary exposure is the cure
A rat who has explored territory is calm…until it gets electrocuted.
Why aren’t you afraid of fire? What if you could learn or acquire fire? Match your behaviour to your fear.
Being trapped in a place is the fear, not the fear itself.
Become bored of the fear, exhaust the nervous system.
Send an invitation, don’t make demands.
We went from Nihilism to Tyranny and back again with many dead on both sides.
Morality and Rationality are false to themselves, meaning a sense of Utopia will fail.
What makes you think having everything you want would make you happy? (unless you are a cow in a cage).
Notes from Underground and the Double, Fyodor Dostoevsky
In short, one may say anything about the history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?
-Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Follow your conscience, don’t lie or become possessed by ideology.
Take responsibility.
Maybe you won’t be so lonely and see every interaction as another passing friend and failed relationship. Maybe you could have a real relationship instead of a phantom.
You don’t have money, you have bills to pay.
Money is the difference between happy and sad, eating and starving, going and staying, being and dying.
We can establish “better/worse” by negotiating and from your perspective.
You characterise your life by the relationships you’ve had.
Capitalise on your traits.
Creativity, even with skills and network has a low probability of success.
People, fundamentally, want to be left alone.
People don’t want to succeed, they just don’t want to fail.
Physical exercise will stop IQ from dropping: your brain needs oxygen and it needs to be cleaned.
You shouldn’t tyrannise or enslave yourself: you should negotiate and offer yourself.
People normally don’t like themselves very much.
Surround yourself with people who want the best for the best part of you.
Don’t be a problem for the people who give you money.
Create a reason to like yourself.
Create a reason to justify your existence (because there are a thousand reasons why you shouldn’t be here.)
Hierarchy is a social being older than trees.
Your mental health is by your expectations and social outcomes by others.
Your emotions are regulated by your map and other people’s actions.
Don’t practise what you do not want to become.
You might lose this game today, but there will be another game tomorrow.
Play fair. The best strategy is to trust people, then if they betray you, punish them —and start again.
Morality comes from play. Play games.
Don’t do for anyone they cannot do for themselves.
Bullying is actually much more shallow.
You’re broken and you’re hoping to see a vision for you to go towards a new place.
You want to get out of chaos and become something new.
You have to bind the anxiety.
You can’t see everything and what you do see is almost nothing.
You should understand the game, and don’t try and understand the players.
Love is the biggest discrimination.
Your past is used to propel yourself into the future.
Maybe your temperaments are not well-aligned.
You apply your own patterns to the patterns of what you perceive. Everything that does the same thing to you is the same thing.
The closer you go up to the metaphysics, the higher the cost of reasoning.
Depressed people make mistakes and send those mistakes to higher and higher places in the value hierarchy.
People with depression overestimate other people’s competency and underestimate their own.
You should always first assume that bad things happen because life is full of randomness; if you first assume that it's your fault, you’ll spend years tearing yourself to pieces wondering what you did wrong.
You need to let go and have the courage to go out on your own.
When you learn something new, you learn that something is wrong.
If the alternative is worse, avoid it.
If you want somebody who does exactly as you want, you’ll be a narcissist and you’ll mistreat them.
Don’t betray your destiny. What is calling you is exactly the thing which is pushing you forward to manifest what is most fulfilling in the world.
If you go your life together, maybe all the suffering will go away.
What if you were the person somebody could ask for help?
You have to know where you are before you know where to go.
Delayed gratification is a sacrifice.
If you don’t stand up and face your fears, your best friends will become your enemies. If you keep quiet and facilitate other people’s behaviours, bad things will happen, and you will be disregarded.
What if there’s something to look forward to?
What if you’re being prepared for something truly special, beautiful and meaningful?
You become exactly how people see you.
Who were you before?
People coming in and out of your life is an intrinsic part of life. Like background noise.
How can you walk away from something and still come back to it?
Mothers don’t eat daughters, or do they?
Coraline, 2009
[Mother] want something to love that isn’t Her.
Find someone that’s willing to stick around.
They will forgive you. They will not forgive you for you, but for themselves, they will regret hating and excluding you.
Bongeziwe Mabandla, Mangaliso, Wena
The glory outweighs the suffering. The glory outweighs the love story. The glory outweighs the sorrow. Put it on a scale, there’s nothing to be compared: what you are expecting, what God is preparing. For those who love Him, eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither has it entered into the hearts of men. What story? God is preparing for you.
You have to become a monster voluntarily.
Predators exploit people who are timid, afraid and those who don’t know who they are.
Learn and become malevolent.
Justice is placed to alleviate you from revenge.
Look at the outcome, and see the motivation.
You should have an identity that transforms over time.
Things which are too big will definitely fail.
You should stand up for what you believe in. If you believe in love, you should stand up for yourself and stop letting people push you around.
Anger Management, 2003
You have to allow yourself to forgive.
Your story is the most important story of all because the understanding of every other story is dependent on your story. The success of any project is dependent on the prerequisites in order to complete such a project.
Why would people want or even prefer tyranny? Why would you?
You should be the person who updates the structure.
You cannot derive an ought from an is.
No facts will tell you how to behave.
You target what you aim at, you aim at what you want.
Identity is delayed fantasy play.
The mother adapts to the child just as much as the child adapts to the mother.
What you have is an obstacle to what you could be.
A little knowledge of death will kill you. Full acceptance of it is the cure.
How can somebody be hurt by words?
If you keep your integrity, if you are true to your word, no matter what the world throws at you, you will win.
To bad friends: “I’m going to live my life, and I’m no longer going to entertain you ruining or destroying it.”
It’s OK to judge people harshly by what they say, what they do, and how they act: what names you call them gives them the gist.
You’ll die right on time, but you might be late for the love of your life.
You should demand things you believe in.
To get something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.
The thing which has caused you deep pain and suffering happens to also be what makes you brilliant and remarkable.
Playboi Carti
“The drip is inside you.”
Beware of unearned wisdom.
Focus on what other people want, and do as much as necessary to see that they get it.
We have established that it’s very hard to get what we want because sometimes you don’t know what the proper sacrifices are. What if other people got what they wanted?
Don’t piggyback on other people’s sacrifices.
It happens when you’re not looking.
"It doesn't matter whether you're first or last, all that matters is that you know where you are." - Bobby, about to perform on stage.
Practise gratitude. What are some things which you are grateful and thankful for?
Put your best foot forward, don’t dwell on the past, remain in today.
Don’t make a request, make an offer.
"Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, be that the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." - Hamlet
Maps of Meaning, Jordan B. Peterson, 2017
Thank you for reaching the end of this article. I hope you found some sense of wisdom in this list of scattered thoughts and reminders in order to stave thoughts of resentment. If you want to stave off resentment completely, although that is near-enough impossible, applying these thoughts to your life and to how you act in the world is a good way to start.
This list is based on listenings from Jordan B. Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning where Peterson "describes how the world is portrayed in story form in myths, rituals and religious conceptualizations and how that is related to brain function and behavior. In doing so, it presents a solid alternative to nihilism and totalitarianism."
If you are experiencing distress and anxiety in your life, I recommend taking a listen and fully applying the thoughts and mediations laid out in this lecture series.
